This is a common misconception about free software. The freedom in free software does not belong to the people that use the software, but rather to the software itself....[snip]... If this all sounds like new age liberal hippiebabble, bring it up with RMS.
Now that you mention it, this idea doesn't sound new age or liberal to me, but it certainly looks like confused babble. I guess I am limited in my imagination, but I fail to see how a quite inanimate piece of code can have its own right to freedom.
And did RMS explicitly say this somewhere? I mean "software wants to be free" is a nice and catchy slogan, but I was unaware that people take it literally. There are some rather major philosophical problems with this approach, you know...
However, he must be doing something right when he came up with the only software license that MS clearly despises...
I fail to see how annoying MS can be used as a criterion of whether something is right or wrong.
If I have leet haxor powers that allow me to magically leave a pile of shit in the middle of the office of every top MS management guy, using these powers will likely annoy MS. Does it mean I am doing something right?
Public domain is NOT the same as Free software. It's nowhere NEAR Free software.
Well, yes. Public domain is considerably more free than "Free software".
With public domain, anyone can take my code and change the license and sell it to me with a restrictive license.
Yes, and that's part of the freedom. You know, freedom doesn't apply only to things you approve of. It also means freedom to do things which you don't like.
If it's in public domain, it's not *your* code any more. Anyone can take and do anything he wants with it, including making a commercial closed-source product being sold for money. That's perfectly fine. That's part of freedom.
This makes Bill happy as a pig in the mud because he can take what I wrote (or paid for with my taxes), embrace, extend, and sell back to me.
Well, don't buy it. I mean, you have the code, right? It's there in the public domain, you can do whatever you want with it. Why would you pay money to Billg if the code is free?
I think your idea of "freedom" is very screwed up. GPL is actually quite a restrictive license, it's just that it is restrictive in other than the usual ways. Freedom means the ability to make meaningful choices, even if you don't like the choice I make and even if you think it's a bad choice for the future/society/environment/children/etc.
So, yes, public research should be in public domain.
they would whip in commands like "useradd -u 120 -g dls -d/apps/dls -s/bin/ksh -c "comment" -m dls " and after doing this they would tell the computer: I did this to achieve this. There would be some kind of fuzzy logic to make the computer understand how to utilize this in future - to make it generic. Then suddenly, you would only need to tell the system: do this.
Ahem.
alias do_this="useradd -u 120...etc."
Looks to me like you were getting to a global database of macros ranked by frequency of use...
What I really want is a more sensitive CCD that can take sharper pictures with less light and more brilliant color.
Sharper pictures are much more a function of the CCD resolution than it's sensitivity.
Brilliant color is mostly a function of your display device. Profiling your monitor and using Photoshop works wonders.:-)
Less light, yeah, you need a more sensitive CCD, but there are some unfortunate laws of physics involving thermal noise which limit how sensitive you can have it (at least at normal temperatures). Astronomers tend to put their CCDs into liquid nitrogen for exactly these reasons. But that's a bit inconvenient for a SLR...
Uncompressed, 16-bits-per-color-channel, around 2700x4000 pixels. Compression will cut it down to maybe half to two thirds of that, but it ain't no.jpg:-)
Any lens system is ultimately limited by diffraction, and you cant get away from it
Very true. In fact, if you close the aperture far enough (to f16 or f22) your image resolution will be diffraction-limited rather than film-limited.
film grains or dye clouds in slides have a finite size that is definitely larger than the pixels in todays modern CCD cameras
I have doubts about this. Resolution of something like Velvia is still higher than resolution of contemporary CCDs, although they are getting there.
Ultimately, the 11 megapixel cameras $6000 price will keep it mostly in the hands of people who need the resolution -- those people making large prints.
The price tag is likely to keep this camera in the hands of professionals... But people making large prints tend to use medium format at least:-)
I've found that the shadow detail in digital cameras (specifically the canon d60) can be absolutely stunning
True, but the problem with digitals is not shadows. It's that they tend to blow out the highlights. And a good print film will still provide much better dynamic range than contemporary digitals.
Anyone that tells you you need 3 megapixel or better to replace film for every-day use is either on drugs, or really doesnt know what they are talking about.
It all depends on what do you call every-day use and what are you criteria for a "good" image.
I doubt very much you'll be able to make an 8x10 image out of a 2 megapixel file at a quality that serious people will find acceptable.
If all you need is 4x6, by all means stick with 2 megapixels. By for an 8x10, no, I don't think so.
My D30 images printed professionally are indistinguishable from 35mm prints up to 20x30. Sooooo, you'll have to qualify your statement for me to believe it. Note that the quality of lenses (I use Canon L glass) contributes significantly to image quality.
I am calling bullshit on this.
A 35mm frame of Velvia or Provia, taken from a tripod will make a noticeably better 20x30 print than your D30 digital file.
For anything less than 8x10 there is no difference. For 8x10 or 11x14 it's arguable. Bigger than this and resolution limitations DO start to show up.
As far as I can tell, his only argument besides this is that if the citizenry pushes for the government to use Free software, companies will push back to use proprietary crud.
Michael, you really should read what you are trying to criticize. It does seem that "as far as you can tell" isn't very far.
Tim's two main points are:
(1) More choice is better than less choice. Forbidding to use commercial software == less choice.
(2) In many (but not all) cases governments should behave rationally and use the best tools available to do a task. Very often commercial software IS the best tool. Forbidding to use it doesn't seem very rational.
Based on my corpus, "sex" indicates a.97 probability of the containing email being a spam, whereas "sexy" indicates.99 probability. And Bayes' Rule, equally unambiguous, says that an email containing both words would, in the (unlikely) absence of any other evidence, have a 99.97% chance of being a spam.
Hmm.... take an average adult geek and yes, an email mentioning sex or sexy can go to/dev/null immediately without as much as a second glance...:-)
On the other hand if you run the statistics on email of an average horny teenager, the probabilities might get a bit different.
VmPd runs on a PC, VmPd contains all keys required to access all areas of itself. VmPd is trusted, because it is a trusted PC (which is the point of this whole mess) to do what it is expected to do.
This might work if and only if you gain access to the private keys of the Pd hardware chip.
If you have these keys, the security is broken completely and you can do whatever you want. Getting them is the hard part.
Keep in mind that you, the owner of the machine, is NOT supposed to have access to these keys. In fact they are specifically protected against YOU.
Pd is trusted in this context means that a Pd machine is trusted by Disney, etc. to display some copy-protected crap. You, the owner, is NOT the trusted party, you are the bad guy, the malicious bastard that your machine has to be protected from.
It used to be that people believed in ethics -- that there are societal responsibilities that compete with shareholder equity.
The problem is that different people have different ethics.
See, the world isn't composed out of affluent white-bread vaguely-Christian Americans. There is a whole bunch of other people around and they tend to have different, sometimes rather different views.
You want corporations to be ethical? Act for morality reasons rather than for profit reasons? Fine, but don't be surprised if, say, a Saudi oil company would start massive funding of islamic fundamentalists. It is morality, just not yours.
My point is that absent some sort of outside enforcement of a reasonable level of safety and quality of products, choosing your corporation is like choosing between hanging or the firing squad.
I cannot imagine an economic system which will make you happy. Having government control all production has already been tried with disastrous consequences. Employee-run companies exist in the US and other countries and are virtually indistinguishable from "normal" corporations. What else is there? You are not advocating we all go back to primitive agricultural communities, are you?
Whether I get RSI by programming for a living implies that, at least in our economic system, I'm overwhelmingly likely to be doing so for a corporation.
That fact is completely irrelevant. RSI is a physiological consequence of too much typing and mousing and has nothing to do with whom you work for. Hell, if you are a writer re-typing up the n-th draft of your great american novel, you are still likely to get RSI.
re Challenger shuttle
Look up what actually happened. As a matter of fact, Thiokol was against the launch, and was overridden by NASA.
Not to mention that the Thiokol engineer that happened to express his professional opinion about the dangers of O-ring failure at the given air temperature was NOT expressing any corporate policy.
Corporations are amoral entities, beholden only to their executives and shareholders.
That's perfectly fine. This is as it should be.
Think about the consequences of corporations acting on the basis of morality. First of all, which morality? Christian? Why? What about Japanese corporations? Or Islamic? Who gets to define on the basis of which morality does corporation operate?
Second, remember that corporations have investors. From my point of view, as an investor, I'll give my money to the corporation that'll make me more money, not to someone who is trying to do some ill-defined good. For that I give to charities and non-profits.
So, I still stand by my original claim that modern-day corporations are more Orwellian than modern-day governments.
Interaction with corporations is unavoidable unless you completely drop out of the economy
You miss the point. I get to choose with which corporations to interact without having to drop out of the economy. It's not an all-or-nothing deal. "Quit your job" implies also "and find another one that's fine for you from your ethical/health/etc. standpoint".
Am I to stop buying canned food for fear it's contaminated with botulism?
If you are paranoid about botulism, then, yes, stop buying canned food. Or do you want to have an absolute, ironclad guarantee that nothing bad will happen to you, ever?
Am I to stop programming for a living for fear that some new form of RSI will disable me decades from now?
Same answer. What does it all have to do with corporations?
Were the workers at Johns-Manville supposed to Just Know... etc.
Grow up yourself. Life is not riskless. If you are not willing to risk failure, sometimes catastrophic failure, you will do nothing. Each activity has an element of risk that you have to accept, even if the risk is not to yourself.
And again, what does this have to do with corporations? When the Challenger shuttle blew up, it wasn't corporate greed that made it do it, was it?
Also, look at the Soviet Union. Horrible working conditions, pollution like the Western world hasn't seen in decades, major industrial accidents with thousands of victims -- and... not a single corporation in sight!
Before screaming loudly at FCC, read the ruling. Specifically the part which says
Today's FCC action is consistent with the decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in 1999, which vacated the FCC's the opt-in approach for a carrier to use, disclose, or permit access to CPNI.
In other words, FCC said it must be opt-in, and the appeals court said NO.
The very worst thing a corporation can do is kill you, either by selling you a deadly (or fatally defective) product, or by giving you a hazardous job, or by poisoning your environment.
Bah! Anyone can kill me, from a next-cubicle worker who's going postal to a suburban mom not exactly sure how to deal with her two-ton SUV...
And you are playing stupid. You are ignoring such things as intent -- selling me a deadly product, e.g. cigarettes, does not aim to kill me, rather my death is an acceptable (to a corp) side-effect fo the transaction. But again, note that the corp didn't come to my house, tie me to a chair and stick the cigarette into my mouth.
Not sure about the safety of the product? Don't buy it. Think your job is dangerous? Quit it.
And as to history, yes, I actually know a fair amount...
1984 was a fiction book, not an exercise in social forecasting a la Toffler. Nobody expected western democracies to match the society described in 1984, but that doesn't make the book's main point less valid.
I stand by my original argument that on the whole, corporations are much more capable of 1984-style control than governments are.
That I find a very strange statement. Let me list some problems with it just off the top of my head.
(1) Corporations are not a unified body. It's an unorganized mob of omnivores of different sizes, all happy to bite each other when a soft spot is uncovered. There is no organ/committee/etc. that CAN exercise control of the type we are talking about.
(2) Corporations are not interested in 1984-style control. All they are interested in is my wallet. Give them money and they'll be happy. Governments, on the other hand, are much less interested in money, but want to exercise much greater control over the way I lead my life and over the choices I make.
(3) The very worst thing that corporations can do to you is sue you into bankrupcy. Governments can do much, much worse things to you.
(4) My relationship with corporations is generally consensual. If I am willing to accept the consequences, I CAN not use credit cards, not eat at McDonalds, not work for Enron, etc. etc. That doesn't work with the government -- it is going to try to impose it's will upon you regardless of what you think about it.
(5) Historically governments have been much, much, much more nastier to people than corporations.
All in all I fail to see how you can argue that corporations are more dangerous than the government.
P.S. My employer doesn't have a policy handbook:-)
The problem is that no clear-cut definition of what a terrorist is exists at this point. I call upon the US and International bodies to come up with a clear, accurate, definition of what a terrorist is.
The usual intelligent definition of terrorism goes somewhere about these lines: "a violent act committed primarily not in order to harm the target/victim, but rather to exert pressure on the political/social fabric of the society".
Slashdot Mirror
This is a common misconception about free software. The freedom in free software does not belong to the people that use the software, but rather to the software itself. ...[snip]...
If this all sounds like new age liberal hippiebabble, bring it up with RMS.
Now that you mention it, this idea doesn't sound new age or liberal to me, but it certainly looks like confused babble. I guess I am limited in my imagination, but I fail to see how a quite inanimate piece of code can have its own right to freedom.
And did RMS explicitly say this somewhere? I mean "software wants to be free" is a nice and catchy slogan, but I was unaware that people take it literally. There are some rather major philosophical problems with this approach, you know...
However, he must be doing something right when he came up with the only software license that MS clearly despises...
I fail to see how annoying MS can be used as a criterion of whether something is right or wrong.
If I have leet haxor powers that allow me to magically leave a pile of shit in the middle of the office of every top MS management guy, using these powers will likely annoy MS. Does it mean I am doing something right?
Public domain is NOT the same as Free software. It's nowhere NEAR Free software.
Well, yes. Public domain is considerably more free than "Free software".
With public domain, anyone can take my code and change the license and sell it to me with a restrictive license.
Yes, and that's part of the freedom. You know, freedom doesn't apply only to things you approve of. It also means freedom to do things which you don't like.
If it's in public domain, it's not *your* code any more. Anyone can take and do anything he wants with it, including making a commercial closed-source product being sold for money. That's perfectly fine. That's part of freedom.
This makes Bill happy as a pig in the mud because he can take what I wrote (or paid for with my taxes), embrace, extend, and sell back to me.
Well, don't buy it. I mean, you have the code, right? It's there in the public domain, you can do whatever you want with it. Why would you pay money to Billg if the code is free?
I think your idea of "freedom" is very screwed up. GPL is actually quite a restrictive license, it's just that it is restrictive in other than the usual ways. Freedom means the ability to make meaningful choices, even if you don't like the choice I make and even if you think it's a bad choice for the future/society/environment/children/etc.
So, yes, public research should be in public domain.
they would whip in commands like "useradd -u 120 -g dls -d /apps/dls -s /bin/ksh -c "comment" -m dls " and after doing this they would tell the computer: I did this to achieve this. There would be some kind of fuzzy logic to make the computer understand how to utilize this in future - to make it generic. Then suddenly, you would only need to tell the system: do this.
Ahem.
alias do_this="useradd -u 120...etc."
Looks to me like you were getting to a global database of macros ranked by frequency of use...
What I really want is a more sensitive CCD that can take sharper pictures with less light and more brilliant color.
:-)
Sharper pictures are much more a function of the CCD resolution than it's sensitivity.
Brilliant color is mostly a function of your display device. Profiling your monitor and using Photoshop works wonders.
Less light, yeah, you need a more sensitive CCD, but there are some unfortunate laws of physics involving thermal noise which limit how sensitive you can have it (at least at normal temperatures). Astronomers tend to put their CCDs into liquid nitrogen for exactly these reasons. But that's a bit inconvenient for a SLR...
Uncompressed, 16-bits-per-color-channel, around 2700x4000 pixels. Compression will cut it down to maybe half to two thirds of that, but it ain't no .jpg :-)
Any lens system is ultimately limited by diffraction, and you cant get away from it
:-)
Very true. In fact, if you close the aperture far enough (to f16 or f22) your image resolution will be diffraction-limited rather than film-limited.
film grains or dye clouds in slides have a finite size that is definitely larger than the pixels in todays modern CCD cameras
I have doubts about this. Resolution of something like Velvia is still higher than resolution of contemporary CCDs, although they are getting there.
Ultimately, the 11 megapixel cameras $6000 price will keep it mostly in the hands of people who need the resolution -- those people making large prints.
The price tag is likely to keep this camera in the hands of professionals... But people making large prints tend to use medium format at least
I've found that the shadow detail in digital cameras (specifically the canon d60) can be absolutely stunning
True, but the problem with digitals is not shadows. It's that they tend to blow out the highlights. And a good print film will still provide much better dynamic range than contemporary digitals.
I have a D30 (3.25mp) and the best quality jpg's are around 1mb.
LOL. I scan my Provia slides in a mid-range consumer film scanner and my raw scan file is around 60Mb for a single slide.
Ten or eleven scans fill up a CD-ROM.
Anyone that tells you you need 3 megapixel or better to replace film for every-day use is either on drugs, or really doesnt know what they are talking about.
It all depends on what do you call every-day use and what are you criteria for a "good" image.
I doubt very much you'll be able to make an 8x10 image out of a 2 megapixel file at a quality that serious people will find acceptable.
If all you need is 4x6, by all means stick with 2 megapixels. By for an 8x10, no, I don't think so.
My D30 images printed professionally are indistinguishable from 35mm prints up to 20x30. Sooooo, you'll have to qualify your statement for me to believe it. Note that the quality of lenses (I use Canon L glass) contributes significantly to image quality.
I am calling bullshit on this.
A 35mm frame of Velvia or Provia, taken from a tripod will make a noticeably better 20x30 print than your D30 digital file.
For anything less than 8x10 there is no difference. For 8x10 or 11x14 it's arguable. Bigger than this and resolution limitations DO start to show up.
Speaking of utopias, I highly recommend Culture from the books of Ian M. Banks (e.g. Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, The Use of Weapons, etc.)
He can say sex all he wants since a steamy e-mail will undoubtedly include enough legitimate non-spam words to save it from being trashed.
ROTFLMAO....
Don't get much steamy email, do you?
As far as I can tell, his only argument besides this is that if the citizenry pushes for the government to use Free software, companies will push back to use proprietary crud.
Michael, you really should read what you are trying to criticize. It does seem that "as far as you can tell" isn't very far.
Tim's two main points are:
(1) More choice is better than less choice. Forbidding to use commercial software == less choice.
(2) In many (but not all) cases governments should behave rationally and use the best tools available to do a task. Very often commercial software IS the best tool. Forbidding to use it doesn't seem very rational.
From the article:
.97 probability of the containing email being a spam, whereas "sexy" indicates .99 probability. And Bayes' Rule, equally unambiguous, says that an email containing both words would, in the (unlikely) absence of any other evidence, have a 99.97% chance of being a spam.
/dev/null immediately without as much as a second glance... :-)
Based on my corpus, "sex" indicates a
Hmm.... take an average adult geek and yes, an email mentioning sex or sexy can go to
On the other hand if you run the statistics on email of an average horny teenager, the probabilities might get a bit different.
VmPd runs on a PC, VmPd contains all keys required to access all areas of itself. VmPd is trusted, because it is a trusted PC (which is the point of this whole mess) to do what it is expected to do.
This might work if and only if you gain access to the private keys of the Pd hardware chip.
If you have these keys, the security is broken completely and you can do whatever you want. Getting them is the hard part.
Keep in mind that you, the owner of the machine, is NOT supposed to have access to these keys. In fact they are specifically protected against YOU.
Pd is trusted in this context means that a Pd machine is trusted by Disney, etc. to display some copy-protected crap. You, the owner, is NOT the trusted party, you are the bad guy, the malicious bastard that your machine has to be protected from.
It used to be that people believed in ethics -- that there are societal responsibilities that compete with shareholder equity.
The problem is that different people have different ethics.
See, the world isn't composed out of affluent white-bread vaguely-Christian Americans. There is a whole bunch of other people around and they tend to have different, sometimes rather different views.
You want corporations to be ethical? Act for morality reasons rather than for profit reasons? Fine, but don't be surprised if, say, a Saudi oil company would start massive funding of islamic fundamentalists. It is morality, just not yours.
My point is that absent some sort of outside enforcement of a reasonable level of safety and quality of products, choosing your corporation is like choosing between hanging or the firing squad.
I cannot imagine an economic system which will make you happy. Having government control all production has already been tried with disastrous consequences. Employee-run companies exist in the US and other countries and are virtually indistinguishable from "normal" corporations. What else is there? You are not advocating we all go back to primitive agricultural communities, are you?
Whether I get RSI by programming for a living implies that, at least in our economic system, I'm overwhelmingly likely to be doing so for a corporation.
That fact is completely irrelevant. RSI is a physiological consequence of too much typing and mousing and has nothing to do with whom you work for. Hell, if you are a writer re-typing up the n-th draft of your great american novel, you are still likely to get RSI.
re Challenger shuttle
Look up what actually happened. As a matter of fact, Thiokol was against the launch, and was overridden by NASA.
Not to mention that the Thiokol engineer that happened to express his professional opinion about the dangers of O-ring failure at the given air temperature was NOT expressing any corporate policy.
Corporations are amoral entities, beholden only to their executives and shareholders.
That's perfectly fine. This is as it should be.
Think about the consequences of corporations acting on the basis of morality. First of all, which morality? Christian? Why? What about Japanese corporations? Or Islamic? Who gets to define on the basis of which morality does corporation operate?
Second, remember that corporations have investors. From my point of view, as an investor, I'll give my money to the corporation that'll make me more money, not to someone who is trying to do some ill-defined good. For that I give to charities and non-profits.
So, I still stand by my original claim that modern-day corporations are more Orwellian than modern-day governments.
And I still think it's quite silly.
Interaction with corporations is unavoidable unless you completely drop out of the economy
... etc.
You miss the point. I get to choose with which corporations to interact without having to drop out of the economy. It's not an all-or-nothing deal. "Quit your job" implies also "and find another one that's fine for you from your ethical/health/etc. standpoint".
Am I to stop buying canned food for fear it's contaminated with botulism?
If you are paranoid about botulism, then, yes, stop buying canned food. Or do you want to have an absolute, ironclad guarantee that nothing bad will happen to you, ever?
Am I to stop programming for a living for fear that some new form of RSI will disable me decades from now?
Same answer. What does it all have to do with corporations?
Were the workers at Johns-Manville supposed to Just Know
Grow up yourself. Life is not riskless. If you are not willing to risk failure, sometimes catastrophic failure, you will do nothing. Each activity has an element of risk that you have to accept, even if the risk is not to yourself.
And again, what does this have to do with corporations? When the Challenger shuttle blew up, it wasn't corporate greed that made it do it, was it?
Also, look at the Soviet Union. Horrible working conditions, pollution like the Western world hasn't seen in decades, major industrial accidents with thousands of victims -- and... not a single corporation in sight!
Before screaming loudly at FCC, read the ruling. Specifically the part which says
Today's FCC action is consistent with the decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in 1999, which vacated the FCC's the opt-in approach for a carrier to use, disclose, or permit access to CPNI.
In other words, FCC said it must be opt-in, and the appeals court said NO.
So bitch at the Tenth Circuit judges, not at FCC.
The very worst thing a corporation can do is kill you, either by selling you a deadly (or fatally defective) product, or by giving you a hazardous job, or by poisoning your environment.
Bah! Anyone can kill me, from a next-cubicle worker who's going postal to a suburban mom not exactly sure how to deal with her two-ton SUV...
And you are playing stupid. You are ignoring such things as intent -- selling me a deadly product, e.g. cigarettes, does not aim to kill me, rather my death is an acceptable (to a corp) side-effect fo the transaction. But again, note that the corp didn't come to my house, tie me to a chair and stick the cigarette into my mouth.
Not sure about the safety of the product? Don't buy it. Think your job is dangerous? Quit it.
And as to history, yes, I actually know a fair amount...
1984 was a fiction book, not an exercise in social forecasting a la Toffler. Nobody expected western democracies to match the society described in 1984, but that doesn't make the book's main point less valid.
:-)
I stand by my original argument that on the whole, corporations are much more capable of 1984-style control than governments are.
That I find a very strange statement. Let me list some problems with it just off the top of my head.
(1) Corporations are not a unified body. It's an unorganized mob of omnivores of different sizes, all happy to bite each other when a soft spot is uncovered. There is no organ/committee/etc. that CAN exercise control of the type we are talking about.
(2) Corporations are not interested in 1984-style control. All they are interested in is my wallet. Give them money and they'll be happy. Governments, on the other hand, are much less interested in money, but want to exercise much greater control over the way I lead my life and over the choices I make.
(3) The very worst thing that corporations can do to you is sue you into bankrupcy. Governments can do much, much worse things to you.
(4) My relationship with corporations is generally consensual. If I am willing to accept the consequences, I CAN not use credit cards, not eat at McDonalds, not work for Enron, etc. etc. That doesn't work with the government -- it is going to try to impose it's will upon you regardless of what you think about it.
(5) Historically governments have been much, much, much more nastier to people than corporations.
All in all I fail to see how you can argue that corporations are more dangerous than the government.
P.S. My employer doesn't have a policy handbook
...pesky constitutions that kept governments from doing what Orwell predicted
Don't know much history, do you?
And what is more interactive than games?
Actually, sex is considerably more interactive than games, but these guys wouldn't know...
The problem is that no clear-cut definition of what a terrorist is exists at this point. I call upon the US and International bodies to come up with a clear, accurate, definition of what a terrorist is.
The usual intelligent definition of terrorism goes somewhere about these lines: "a violent act committed primarily not in order to harm the target/victim, but rather to exert pressure on the political/social fabric of the society".
Err... RelliK, how about attributing your .sig?